Almost six weeks after the hacktivist group Anonymous announced that it had raised some $55,000 on Indiegogo to fund its own independent news site, the group has finally given some details about what we can look forward to.

In a note posted on Pastebin, Anonymous said that its team was “working hard to design something clean, practical and also fun to use”, with the idea being to create a site that engages ordinary people away from mainstream news services. As explained on the original Indiegogo page, Anonymous already has a sizeable audience on sites like Twitter and its Your Anon News blog on Tumblr, and now wants to go ‘beyond’ this with an official portal of its own.

“We’ll engineer a new website which will allow us to collect breaking reports and blog postings from the best independent reporters online. We’ll provide feeds for citizen journalists who livestream events as they are taking place, instead of the 10-second sound bites provided by the corporate media.”

Anonymous said that its overall aims haven’t changed and that its Twitter accounts will be “heavily integrated” into the new site, which doesn’t come as a surprise given how important that medium has been to the group in the past. On the flip side, there was no mention of any Facebook integration so we can presume that won’t figure, and neither will there be a comments section, as Anonymous claims that this is “rarely used to its full potential.”

That doesn’t mean ordinary folks won’t be able to have their say. Much like its Tumblr blog, the new site will encourage ‘citizen journalists’ to submit their own reports, as these are often at the center of breaking news – the protests last weekend in Istanbul being a price example of how frontline journalists break news far more quickly than official sources.

In addition to this, Anonymous says that its site will aggregate content from other ‘independent media’ sources, when given permission to do so. The group hasn’t said named any names regarding potential partners, but we’d imagine that the vast majority of these would be independent sites and bloggers, as opposed to large corporations like CNN or the BBC.

#OpTurkey Kicks Off

In other news, Anonymous has sided with Turkish protesters following the riots in Istanbul’s Taksim Gezi Park and elsewhere in the country this weekend. With widespread reports of police violence against demonstrators appearing on social media, the collective has vowed to launch a wave of attacks on government sites in retaliation, saying that it’ll “bring the government to its knees” with the launch of #OpTurkey.

The Hurriyet Daily news cites a video posted on YouTube by the collective. In it, Anonymous states that Turkey’s Prime Minister Erdogan “should learn from the fate of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and resign before inflaming the situation further”. The Hurriyet goes on to claim that Anonymous has already managed to take down a number of media sites that support Erdogan government, including that of the private news broadcaster NTV, which has been heavily criticized for ignoring events of the last few days. Other sites believed to have been attacked include Turkish President Abdullah Gul’s personal website, the Istanbul Police Department’s website, and that of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).

“We have watched for days with horror as our brothers and sisters in Turkey who are peacefully rising up against their tyrannical government [have been] brutalized, beaten, run over by riot vehicles, shot with water cannons and gassed in the streets,” claimed an Anonymous spokesperson in the YouTube video.